The impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on United States tornadoes has been a controversial topic in the last 15 years. Widely varied and contradicting conclusions exist regarding the topic, especially when attempting to correlate shifts in location of tornadoes to ENSO phase. For instance, Hagemeyer (1998) noted a tendency toward stronger, more frequent tornadoes in Florida during El...

The Mesocyclone Detection Algorithm (MDA) is used in the Weather Surveillance Radar –1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) to detect rotation associated with tornadoes and other severe weather. The MDA analyzes Doppler radar radial velocity volume scans to compose a number of attributes thought to be related to mesocyclone formation. The 23 attributes of the MDA are compared to truthed tornado data in explora...

Tornadoes, which are one of the most feared natural phenomena, present a significant challenge to forecasters who strive to provide adequate warnings of the imminent danger. Forecasters recognize the general environmental conditions within which a tornadic thunderstorm, called a supercell thunderstorm, will form. They also recognize a supercell thunderstorm with its rotating updraft, or mesocyc...

A high-resolution simulation of the 8 May 2003 Oklahoma tornadic supercell is analyzed to determine the origin of internal outflow surges within the low-level cold pool. The analyzed simulation has 50-m horizontal grid spacing and is quadruply nested within larger, lower-resolution domains that were initialized via threedimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) of radar and other observ...

A new type of mechanical aortic valve prosthesisTornado-compatible valve (TCV) is worked out basing on the principle of hydrodynamic compatibility with the swirling Tornado-like blood flow present in the heart cavities and main arteries. The design and profile of the TCV were calculated basing on the exact solution of the non stationary hydrodynamic equations for the class of self organizing To...

Hardware accelerators o‚er developers the ability to improve the performance and energy eciency of their applications. However, a key barrier that is preventing their widespread adoption are the shortcomings of existing tools for heterogeneous programming — they are not designed to handle the complexity of deploying an application into an environment where the availability and type of hardware...

In previous work the authors demonstrated an empirical relation, in the form of an index, between U.S. monthly tornado activity andmonthly averaged environmental parameters.Here a detailed comparison ismade between the index and reported tornado activity. The index is a function of two environmental parameters taken from the North American Regional Reanalysis: convective precipitation (cPrcp) a...

BACKGROUND Relatively few studies have examined prevalence and predictors of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depressive episode (MDE) in disaster-affected adolescents. Fewer still have administered diagnostic measures or studied samples exposed to tornadoes, a common type of disaster. Further, methodologic problems limit the generalizability of previous findings. This study addres...

Five misocyclones occurring along a narrow cold frontal rainband (NCFR) were detected by single, X-band Doppler radar at Yokosuka, Japan on April 20, 2006. Each of the misocyclones, which formed in succession in the core and gap regions of the meandering NCFR over a period of 30 minutes, had a short lifetime. Three of the five misocyclones generated near the surface and reached altitudes of up ...